Nora H. sent in this excellent example of how advertisers gender chores.
For more examples, see these: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen,.
See also our posts about how funny it is when men do housework: one, two, here, and three.
Aghfdsgjdfs
This ad drives me crazy. It even aired in between “Mad Men”.
…..okay I would have cracked up if it was on during Mad Men.
Otherwise, lulzy add that encourages gendered divisions of housework (or should I say lack of division) is just kind of depressing.
This commercial is on the first disc of the second season of “Mad Men” — and you can’t skip it. GRR. Clorox has really glommed onto “Mad Men” for the whole back-to-basics/just-like-your-grandma-did-it marketing ploy. Unfortunately, they haven’t picked up on the show’s critique of the very gender norms this commercial is reinforcing.
“…even a male or two.” O_o
It would’ve been seriously AWESOME if it had just been a man at the end doing laundry after all that talk of “your mother, and her mother…” What a great twist. Maybe it could have even been a man with his daughter, instead of the mom. OR even a man teaching his son how to do laundry.
Oh well, better luck next time.
As someone pointed out in the Youtube comments, the terrible grammar of the voiceover script makes for a hilarious unintentional meaning. “Your mother, your grandmother, and her mother… they all did the laundry, maybe even a man or two.” You know “your momma” jokes are worn out when you hear them on laundry commercials. :3
ROFL I didn’t even see that! Good one 
This commercial also reinforces white privilege. The commercial ends with “pure white,” reinforcing an association between “white/whiteness” and “purity.” I suggest tagging it as well under “white privilege” (or similar categories).
Two things:
1) I sure do wish they’d thought to have mom kickin’ it on the couch for that one moment where dad’s doing the laundry. Then again, maybe he’s a single dad.
2) Is it me or are the first two women servants? Their clothes, and the fact that there are two of them seems to imply it. Which, once I noticed it, gave the whole “your mother, your grandmother, and her mother” thing a strange flavor. From a quick google, it looks like the washer shown is from around 1908 or so. Putting the scene, as I suspected, in my great grandmothers’ time. Thing is, I’m pretty sure that… well, let’s just say: my great grandmothers would have been the servants. So… yeah.
Critical nostalgia failure.
The whole female servants doing laundry thing is definitely historically accurate, though, so I can’t really fault them as sexist on that one. You’re right, though, it gives a weird tinge to the whole flavor of the commercial.
I can come up with a devil’s advocate defense, though – perhaps they are trying to slip a contrast into your mind between the excessively hard work that laundry used to be and the really super easy task that it is today?
I agree with you that depicting men doing the laundry at the beggining would be, well, a fairy tale. But one the irony here is that the exactly same ad could’ve been used to demonstrate how little things have changed regarding housework. The “one thing has not [changed]” line could easily have been followed by “housework is still maily done by women, not men”.
[...] It’s not so much the blatant sexism, which is all too common–see Dockers, Dell, Clorox–but the pragmatic issues. Was there really an untapped market of men who weren’t eating [...]
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